November 22, 2009: Chamber music under the 'anxiety of influence'

There is this precious (perhaps too much so) scene in Wes Craven's 1999 film Music of the Heart, in which Isaac Stern is "introducing" Carnegie Hall to Roberta Guaspari (played by Meryl Streep).  He talks of all the sounds one can still hear resonating in the Hall, still reverberating past performances by Fritz Kreisler, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Jascha Heifetz, and others.  (Those may not be exactly the names he cited, but you get the point.)  I do not know if Stern actually said these things when the real Guaspari brought her string orchestra of Harlem students to perform there to raise money for her music education program, but Stern was never one for acting from a script.  The fact is, however, that every major concert hall resonates with its past performances;  and Davies Symphony Hall is no exception.  You do not have be an Isaac Stern.  You just have to be a regular concert goer to appreciate that the past is always there each time you attend an event.

Sometimes, however, when the past is too proximal, those resonances may not be conducive to the present.  Thus, it was hard for chamber music on a Sunday afternoon not to be influenced by the blazing finale to Johannes Brahms' second symphony that had taken place only sixteen hours previously, not to mention the reverberating forces of Arnold Schoenberg and Richard Wagner that preceded that symphony.  Just as the young Felix Mendelssohn was a tough act to follow the mature Franz Schubert in a string quartet recital this past June, much of the chamber music repertoire would be similarly vulnerable to the full force of symphonic monuments, even after over half a day had elapsed.

By all rights the G major string quintet by Antonín Dvorák should have derived some benefit from proximity to that Brahms symphony.  Brahms first became acquainted with Dvorák's music in 1877, the year in which that second symphony performed last night was completed;  and Brahms was sufficiently impressed that he recommended Dvorák to his publisher Simrock.  That G major quintet was one of the first works sent to Simrock;  but it went through revisions, only converging on its final form in 1888, when Simrock republished it with the misleading Opus number 77.  While the opening sonata form movement is more than a little callow, the Scherzo movement definitely shows signs of the Dvorák-yet-to-come, as does the emotional principle theme of the following Poco andante.  On the other hand Dvorák's sense of a Finale has a way to go before coming up to the caliber of his mentor.  Nevertheless, the performers (violinists Diane Nicholeris and John Chisholm, violist Jonathan Vinocour, cellist David Goldblatt, and bassist Scott Pingel) certainly did much to reveal the potential of the music and why it struck Brahms' attention as positively as it did.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was on much more solid ground with his K. 407 quintet in E-flat major for horn and strings.  For one thing the strings consisted of only one violin (Dan Carlson), two violas (Jonathan Vinocour and Katie Kadarauch), and cello (Amos Yang), making for a relatively unconventional string sound.  Furthermore, this is yet another piece of Mozart's chamber music that is more in the spirit of a concerto (in this case for horn) and "very small orchestra;"  and Jessica Valeri certainly had the chops to deliver a concerto-style performance.  Finally, as a result of Mozart's personal relationship with the original horn player, Joseph Ignaz Leutgeb, this is a work that abounds with wit, much of which derives from clever brief interruptions of total silence.  Whether or not this was the work that inspired Ludwig van Beethoven to pursue a similar approach to silence in early works such as his Opus 2 piano sonatas can be left for debate by musicologists, but the technique is an effective one in the hands of both Mozart and Beethoven.

The composer whose music had the hardest time with any residue of nineteenth-century symphonic sounds in Davies was Bohuslav Martinu.  His four-movement 1937 sonata for flute, violin, and piano was never intended to be more than a lightweight "romp" (to use the same noun that James Keller engaged in his notes for the program book).  Its playful spirit would probably have been more infectious in a more intimate setting;  but flautist Catherine Payne, violinist John Chisholm, and pianist Robin Sutherland could not quite pull it off in the Davies space, not at least with all those spirits lingering from last night.